


By the tock of the clock, and every hour after

by iwantcandy2



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, POV Second Person, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 17:26:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1477966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iwantcandy2/pseuds/iwantcandy2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>According to the laws of causality in Paradox Space, everything happens for a reason. So if the universe gives you a second chance, you deserve it, right? </p>
<p>Or maybe the universe is wrong. Maybe there is no starting over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the tock of the clock, and every hour after

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liasangria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liasangria/gifts).



> I totally didn't realize until after I finished writing the piece that liasangria = manicpeixesdreamgirl. Totally a fan of your work! Hope this piece brings as much joy to you as your pieces have brought to me. =)

“It had to be this way.”

“Don’t fuckin say that. You’ll make me sick.”

“It’s true, though. If you hadn’t done it, everyone would have ended up in a doomed timeline.”

“So you’re saying my being an unredeemable asshole is a universal inevitability?”

“Not at all, actually,” you correct, sitting beside him on the damp stone. Even in repose, you have trouble staying still. It just feels good to be alive. “There were a _ton_ of universes where you didn’t kill anybody. You went godtier in a couple, went out in a blaze of glory heroically protecting your teammates.”

Eridan sniffs, his fins twanning with the force. “Oh, okay, that’s all right, then. _They_ got to be fuckin heroes.”

He tosses a rock into the pool, shooting it with such expert grace that it goes in with barely a ripple. The hollow plunk adds to the other cave noises, the _plink plink_ of water dripping in the distance and the throaty sighing of cave wind. You like this place. Most people would think a cave would be quiet, dead. But it isn’t; it is full of life and energy. You just had to look.

“So you’re the expert on doomed timelines,” Eridan broke in, voice washing away the gentle tones of the underground. “Care to tell me exactly _why_ my killing people was crucial for the continuation of the timeline? Like, exactly how did the outcome of my actions change the course of events for the better?”

You shrug.

“I’m not sure that it did.”

“You mean to tell me that my murder spree was in no way significant to shaping the future, and yet paradox space decided it had to happen anyways or it was all for nothing?”

You shrug again. You can see the anger written in his eyebrows. He thinks you’re being blithe. Like you’re purposely being dismissive of his struggle.

“Sorry,” you chime. “I know you really want a better explanation, but I’m afraid I don’t have one! Sometimes things have to happen a certain way, even if we can’t understand why. Paradox space is cruel like that.”

He mutters a rustblood slur under his breath and hunches in on himself. It can’t be too comfortable. If you were to guess, you’d say that in the entire time you two have been talking, his royal derriere hasn’t touched the floor once. He’s just sort of squatting there on his heels, looking awkward and uncomfortable. Sure, the ground is damp, but a little wet doesn’t hurt anyone. Except for those couple of timelines where Tavros drowned or Karkat caught hypothermia or you fatally short-circuited due to a leak or whatnot.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” he mutters. “You can go now.”

“Of course I can. I can go whenever I please,” you reply, smiling. “But right now I choose to stay.”

He scowls at you. Or rather, his scowl deepens, because he was already scowling in the first place. It seems to be his default expression.

“Why? This place is a shithole,” he says, gesturing around to the dank expanse of his underground lair. They had plenty of grist leftover from the game to alchemize proper dwellings for everyone, but Eridan had sort of disappeared before things got organized. Instead, he had taken up residence in a nearby cave. And yes, it was a shithole. Quite literally. The bats that shared his residence made sure of that.

“I’m enjoying the ambiance,” you reply truthfully.

He huffs and rolls his eyes. After another few moments of uncomfortable shifting, he gets up and walks away. He returns to the little writing desk he has in the corner. Soon, the soft scritch of his quill on paper joins the cave noise.

Sighing, you close your eyes and take in the atmosphere. You stretch out, feel the time forwards and backwards of this place. This cave has so many memories, so many adventures still waiting in its future. You sit like that, feel time dripping past like the calcite-rich water of the cave, for 53 minutes.

Satisfied, you rise to your feet. Eridan is plugging along on his paper, but you can feel his eyes make a few hesitant glances at you. He refuses to acknowledge your presence, probably hoping that if he doesn’t initiate conversation you will leave without talking to him. It’s amazing how well you can know a person when you’ve known them several times across several different timelines.

You approach him, your steps as even and measured as a metronome. The closer you get, the more he hunches over his paper, trying to pretend he doesn’t notice you.

“What are you writing?” you ask. From here, it looks like some sort of exotic alien language, all weird charts and crooked numbers.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but I am writing down as much math and science as I can remember.”

“Why?”

“Cause, we don’t have access to any of our old schoolin. If someone doesn’t do this, then our descendants will have to rediscover all this shit from scratch. Be like fuckin reinventin the wheel.”

“So you are sitting here in a cave writing text books for future generations so they don’t have to live like cave trolls? That’s kinda ironic. You’re even writing it with a quill! How wonderfully archaic.”

You giggle, and he glares at you.

“I happen to like the sound quills make, okay? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have important work to do.”

Again he returns to scrabbling on the paper with a ferocity that could be mistaken for vigor. He is trying oh so hard to ignore you. He also isn’t very good at it. You stand there, enjoying his increasing discomfort and fluster.

Finally, he slams his hands down on the table and glares at you.

“Can I help you?”

You smile. It is nice to have a face that is pliable and obeys your commands.

“Probably not,” you admit, “but I think I would like to try anyways.”

He quirks and eyebrow and says, “Mind explainin’ yourself?”

“Not at all. In fact, I would love to,” you reply. You take a seat on the bench beside him, sitting half on his lap until he gets the hint and scoots to the side. “I can’t help but think that being around you is remarkably like looking in a mirror.”

“Mm-hmm,” he replies. He’s purposely feigning disinterest to get you back for purposely being vague. You suppose you deserve it. It’s just surprisingly hard to say exactly what you mean sometimes!

“I think…we more or less want the same thing,” you reply, the smile falling away from your face like the dead skin flaking off a snake. “I stood by and watched so many people get hurt, and I didn’t do anything to stop it.”

“And I’m a trigger-happy maniac, so somehow that should make us best friends?” he asks, derision dripping from his voice. “Look, maybe for some un _fathomable_ reason, you’re tryin to make me feel better, but it ain’t workin.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel better. Especially since I don’t think you want to feel better.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” he snarls, drawing himself up and throwing his shoulders back.

“It means I see right through your emotional flagellation,” you reply. “You cut yourself off from everyone and everything you care about. Because you figure maybe if you punish yourself enough, things will be even.”

“How the fuck would you know what I’m thinking?”

He’s angry now, fins flared out and lips peeled back in a snarl. It’s a dangerous game to play, getting a seadweller riled up.

“I know because I feel the same way,” you explain, taking his hand in yours so he can’t lash out at you. You can feel the tremors running through him. “Even when I’m in the same room as my friends, I’m still universes apart. I watched them die. All of them, in one timeline or another.”

He attempts to extract his hand from yours, but you hold on tight. He’s still snarling, teeth a thousand points of pain.

“Look, sorry about your issues, but I really think we’re on different levels here,” he points out. His voice is an attempt at cool and factual, but it’s stretched too thin to be convincing. “So you saw some people die, and you got some survivor’s guilt. ‘S not exactly the same thing as killin people who trusted you. What, you figure if you hang around someone worse than you, you’ll feel like peaches in no time?”

With a vicious tug, he pulls his arm free. He rises from the bench, circling you slowly like a wolf closing in on its prey.

You feel what you haven’t felt in a long time: uncertainty. After the game ended, there were no more doomed timelines to jump back and forth with. You have no idea what the future holds. It’s more exciting than you remembered!

Taking your chances, you say, “I could have saved you, you know. I knew what was going to happen. I could have stopped it. It would have been easy.”

“But you couldn’t,” he counters. “Messin with events would have fucked things up, sent us to a doomed timeline.”

“I could have saved Feferi.”

He looks at you, murder in his eyes. You can feel each second pass by on tiptoe. You are aware of the cave sounds again, the harsh pants of Eridan’s barely-contained rage added to the chorus.

“You fuckin should have,” he says, sagging. All of a sudden he’s not a danger to anyone. He’s just tired. “You should have saved us. We’d’ve been doomed, but at least we coulda been happy.”

“We could be happy now,” you say, with more than a little anger in your voice. “That’s why I did what I did. That’s why I sacrificed everything a thousand times over. So we could have this chance, all of us, to be happy. No one left behind. No one forgotten.”

He’s looking at you like you are a bug he has just stepped on. His nose is wrinkled, his lips pulled back in disgust.

“Well, hate to break it to you, but you failed. Some of us got written out of your happy ending.”

He turns away from you with a sweep of his cape. He’s probably used to ending conversations in such a dramatic fashion, and he probably expects you to just go with it. Unfortunately for him, you’ve given up being predictable.

You snatch the tail end of his cape and whip him around. He stumbles ungracefully towards you, and you catch him by the shoulders. His mouth flapping like the fish he evolved from, he looks at you with a mixture of shock and fear.

“I’m tired of not saving people,” you say, looking him straight in the dilated eyes. “I’ve seen us destroy ourselves a thousand times over. This time, I’m not going to stand by and watch.”

His mouth is still opening and closing, and it’s only a matter of seconds before his larynx catches up with his masseter. Eridan was always very good at letting his mouth make decisions instead of his brain. You decide to give his brain a few extra seconds to process everything by stalling his mouth.

You kiss him. It possibly short circuits his brain, as he does nothing for several seconds. When you pull away, he has the same expression of nervous bewilderment as when you started.

“Is that, uh, is that the saving part, or is there somethin’ else to go along with it, too?” he asks, eyeing you skeptically.

“It is my solemn duty to make sure you get your head out of your waste chute long enough to realize you have been given a second chance, and should not waste it. And I’m willing to accomplish that by any means necessary.”

His lips are doing the open/close thing again. It’s oddly endearing how bad his brain-to-mouth connection is. Before he can say something stupid and ruin the moment, you haul him forward.

“Come on. There is a new world out there. I would like to show it to you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this story was an interesting experience. I had attempted a fic before that explored the inevitability of paradox space and why cruel fates were selected as necessary ones in one of my earliest stories, but that story frankly sucked, and I never felt like it got its message across. And then along comes Aradia, with her perspective on doom and acceptance, and what I was originally trying to say in that fic so long ago came back and finally blossomed. So thank you for the prompt, liasangria, it was just what I needed.


End file.
